Cellar Door & Farm Gate

Tasmania is Australia’s cool climate wine centre, producing 10 per cent of Australia’s premium and ultra-premium wines for the domestic and international market.

Tasmania won its first international wine award at the Paris Exhibition in 1848. The wine came from a small vineyard in Hobart and to this day, about 120 bottles are produced each year from the remnants of those original prize-winning vines.
Tasmanian wine production all but disappeared until the middle of this century. ‘Too far south, too cold, the grapes will never ripen’ was the generally accepted view. However, in the 1950s two visionaries, Jean Miguet at Providence near Pipers River in northern Tasmania and Claudio Alcorso at Moorilla Estate in Hobart, proved otherwise.

Cool climate a virtue
Tasmania’s cool climate and long autumn days are now recognised as a virtue, closer to the climatic conditions of Europe’s famous wine regions than to those of continental Australia. The Tasmanian climate provides grapes with a long growing season and a relatively dry ripening period between January and April, resulting in wines of distinctive elegance and finesse.

The state has 241 vineyards, totaling more than 900 hectares. Along with winery infrastructure, this represents a capital investment of more than $50 million and an employment base of about 600 people.

Premium wine producer
Tasmania produces just 0.2 per cent of the total Australian Wine Crush but over 10 per cent of the premium and ultra-premium wine market (domestic and international).

One of the most climatically extreme wine growing regions in
Australia, Tasmania is the ‘Cool Climate’ wine growing state in Australia. Divided into smaller sub-regions Tasmania produces wines from its far north to its deepest south and east to west, each microclimate suitable to specific cool climate grape varieties. Tasmanian sparkling wines, aromatic rieslings and gerwurztraminers, chardonnays and pinot noir wines have attracted praise.

Tasmanian wine tourism is thriving and cellar doors are open around the state, most associated with formal wine routes.

For more information see the Cellar Door & Farm Gate Guide